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November 10, 2008

Social manifesto - How companies are using social media. Part 1 of 4

CNET recently reported that 75% of Fortune 1000 companies will launch a social media campaign this year. They also noted that 50% of those campaigns will fail.

To stay in the right 50% of those campaigns, marketers, customer service advocates and brand czars follow one of four proven models:
#1: Let your customers or employees support each other.
Build a central hub where they can ask questions, collect ideas and celebrate the brand.

Pros:

Very authentic way to use the social Web

Inexpensive to operate AND can reduce customer service/HR costs

Cons:

Takes a lot of work to seed and build

The crowd CAN turn on you if support or product development are unresponsive

Make sure you:

Set expectations: What does success look like?

An example: Blue Shirt Nation

Best Buy’s Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt had a fundamentally simple idea: Use technology to enable employees to talk to and help each other.

In their quest they developed Blue Shirt Nation: an internal communications platform that generates thousands of conversations across the company. The result, more information, more issues, more solutions, more ideas, more impact — and a corporate culture that is beginning to appreciate that buy-in brings out the best in employees.